Johan Vass author page

So nice to be back with my second puzzle — and on Christmas of all days to boot! I guess with a little bit of imagination, the grid is maybe sort of Christmas tree-shaped. Personally, though, I mostly see an old telephone.

It's not intended to look like anything in particular, though; the wacky grid design is purely incidental. It started simply as an attempt to build a triple stack of 15s. Once I had that in place and was trying to figure out where to go from there, I soon realized that I could build that little arch around the central crossing entries and use left-right symmetry rather than rotational. That's nice since it gave me the freedom to play around with the placement of black squares in the upper half of the grid until the very end of the construction process, rather than having a fixed layout that I needed to adhere to.

I'm especially pleased that the one layout that did end up working for the upper part is the one that perfectly matches the big stairstep chunks of black squares in the lower half, which I think certainly added a bit of elegance to the puzzle.

Hope everyone's having a wonderful Christmas. It truly makes me happy that something I made gets to be a part of it for so many people.

So happy to be making my New York Times debut! This has been a goal of mine for quite a few years now. I'm not exactly new to crossword-making though, far from it. I've just mostly been making them in a different language.

I was born in Stockholm, Sweden, almost exactly 30 years ago, and have probably been making crosswords for well over 20 of them. I don't even really remember at what exact age I first started, but I was very young. As a kid I used to make crosswords in my native Swedish for a solving audience consisting mostly of my parents, but at the age of 20 I started contributing regularly to a Swedish crossword magazine, which I continued to do for a few years.

Over time though, I started to grow a bit bored with Swedish puzzles and felt that I needed a new challenge, so around 9 years ago I decided to try and see if I could solve an American crossword. Turned out I couldn't. So I continued trying until I could, and ever since then I've been solving the NYT and other American puzzles daily. Coming from a constructor background, it was always a no-brainer for me that I wanted to learn to construct American crosswords as well.

We Swedes may be very heavily influenced by American culture, and are usually ranked as some of the best non-native English speakers in the world, but there are obviously still some culture/language barriers I have to deal with when it comes to American puzzles. But part of the fun in doing crosswords is getting to learn new things, and I'm probably learning just as much from making them as I am from solving them, and am really enjoying myself in the process.

I started making this particular puzzle back in September, submitted it in November, and it got accepted just over a month ago, in early March. It came about very spontaneously, inspired simply by hearing someone use the expression "like trying to find a needle in a haystack," immediate realizing its potential as a basis for a theme, and within seconds I started working on the puzzle, without even so much as an idea as to what to actually do with it beyond the central gimmick. I honestly didn't even have much hope that it would actually work, as it required stacking so many theme answers directly on top of each other, which is never an easy task. So I was really pleased that it actually did turn out to be doable, and that it eventually made it all the way to getting published in the New York Times.

I had another puzzle (a low-word count themeless) accepted at the same time as this one as well, so you can definitely expect to see more from me in the future.